Just a few hours before I heard the news of Mandela's passing, I was struggling to write about a contentious, emotionally-charged charter school co-location hearing that took place recently in my Brooklyn neighborhood of Fort Greene. I'm not especially prone to frustrated outbursts, but the writing was going badly, and at a certain point I got so overwhelmed by the swarm of voices duking it out in my head over charter school policy, local politics, teacher assessment, social justice, gentrification and school reform, that the next thing I knew I was slamming my laptop shut, shoving myself back from my desk and yelling -- out loud to no one, like a crazy person -- "I'm not doing this! This is IMPOSSIBLE!"

Not a great note to end a writing session on, but it had gotten late and it was time to quit anyway. I needed to snap back into mom-mode and get home to make dinner, wrestle my three small kids into their pajamas, and get the bedtime launch sequence started. I gathered up my stuff and checked my phone, and only then did I see that Mandela had passed away.